Due to the intensity of its anguished and baroque surfaces, its radical reconstruction of spatial dimensions, and its cartoonish, sometimes grotesque approach to performance and film dramaturgy, Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1944-46) – the Soviet master’s final work, one of the prime glories of the cinema – may be plausibly considered one… Read more »
The comic filmmaker Frank Tashlin (1913-1972) is probably best remembered today for directing Jerry Lewis in several outings during the 1950s and early 1960s, before Lewis embarked on his own directorial career. One label that I’ve observed other writers use to describe the filmmaking style of both Tashlin and Lewis is “plastic control.” This notion… Read more »
It is nearly impossible to define the essence of Nicholas Ray’s 1958 masterpiece Wind Across the Everglades, at once a kind of Floridian swamp western, a mysterious parable about the richness of the natural world, as well as an existential grudge match waged between an environmentalist and a bird poacher (Christopher Plummer and the powerful… Read more »
The cinema of Jerry Lewis is nothing if not bodily, and its capacity to formally display certain anxieties regarding the physical relationship between himself and his audience can sometimes result in feelings of discomfort and aversion in the viewer. Lewis, as filmmaker and as performer, draws upon the kinetic devices of multiplicity and metatextuality in… Read more »
Although the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963) now enjoys a kind of central position in the mainstream canon of film history, his work was not seen in its totality in the United States until the 1970s – and at that time, his work was subjected to some of the most inept and derogatory criticism… Read more »
By now, it’s no secret among genre aficionados and admirers of Hong Kong cinema that Lau Kar-leung (1934-2013) was among the world’s finest practitioners of the martial arts film and, by extension, of the action film more broadly. Lau, a filmmaker of considerable artistic stature in his home country, is one of the more well-known… Read more »